Bernays sees rhetoric as an instrument of progress, a way for people to move closer to True Enlightenment. "Prejudices," he says, "are often the application of old taboos to new conditions. They are illogical, emotional, and hampering to progress." Very much a turn of the century idea--out with the folksy superstition, in with firm, inescapable logic. Naturally, rhetoric can be scientifically formulated to produce the desired result. Just three easy steps, stir occasionally, and voila! People start buying panatropes.

He seems to feel people are extremely persuaded by sense, and that if you just point people in the right way, that way will they go. He doesn't even really seem to see it as persuasion, just that there is a truth that is perfectly obvious to some people, and they just have to present it in the right way to make other people agree. It does not seem to occur to him that someone could present a truth in exactly the right way and still be disbelieved.

Bernays very readily separates his audience into cultural readymades such as scientists, enthusiasts, critics, experts, laymen, beautiful young women, and so on.

Lipmann, on the other hand, seems to see rhetoric as the dropping of small stones into a wide river: they might have some effect, but it's so small as to be negligible. He seems to believe either that politics has become criminally complicated and divorced from real life, or he believes that the people is a beast. Or both. He most likely believes that government and the public are both caught up in an unstoppable inertia. Nothing is new under the sun, all politicians are the same no matter what they call themselves, and the public are too numerous and fickle to ever unite for any cause.

He sees persuasion of the people as a waste of time, since most of the time they're too wrapped up in their own plebeian lives to hear what you're trying to tell them. Although he never comes right out and says it, he seems to feel that coercion is the only language the average American understands. It is hard to figure out whether he thinks this is bad or not. Does he admire rhetoricians' ability to highlight or obscure issues, or does he Seriously resent their meddling?

Unlike Bernays, Lipmann believes that men are almost completely unpredictable--that the only thing you can depend on them doing most of the time is nothing.